Total Fucking Destruction …To Be Alive at the End of the World streaming online !

It feels trite to crown an album “the soundtrack to the pandemic,” but fuck it, if people are going to do it with Fiona Apple, I’ll do it with Total Fucking Destruction. The Philly trio opens their fifth full-length with “…To Be Alive at the End of the World,” a hypnotic koan not far removed from Al Cisneros’s meditative work in Om, albeit one infused with apocalyptic paranoia.

It’s five minutes of calm before another five minutes—and eight tracks—of storm, as the band drops into its familiar brand of schizophrenic, anything-goes grindcore. Richard Hoak is a grind legend for a reason; his pioneering drumming for Brutal Truth laid down a blueprint for the genre that resonates to this day. Hoak drums and sings for Total Fucking Destruction, and while the band can grind with the best of them, it’s really his outlet for whatever creative flights of fancy occur to him. “Sound on Sound” is a minute-long AM radio love song, and “Yelling at Velcro” is just 20 seconds of Hoak yelling, presumably, at Velcro.

The album closes with a deranged, atonal version of “The Star Spangled Banner” that sure doesn’t seem to be there because of some vehement patriotism. The pacing of the album seems to mirror the experience of living in the time of Covid (or during the “Attack of the Supervirus 1138,” as one of the album’s finest grind tracks calls it). You start the day with a Zen meditation, then you panic, then you think of love, then you get angry at something mundane, then you turn on the TV and some jackass is waving an American flag. Wash, rinse, repeat, ad infinitum.